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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shenon, Philip.
A cruel and shocking act : The secret history of the Kennedy assassination /
Philip Shenon.
pages
cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-8050-9420-6 (hardback)—ISBN 978-1-4299-4369-7 (electronic
book) 1. Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917–1963—Assassination.
2. United States. Warren Commission. I. Title.
E842.9.S46 2013
973.922092—dc23
2013031968
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p. 491: © Rene Burri/Magnum Photos.
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Printed in the United States of America
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“The assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November
22, 1963, was a cruel and shocking act of violence directed
against a man, a family, a nation, and against all mankind.”
The final report of the President’s Commission
on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,
September 24, 1964
Question: Did he tell you anything about his trip to Mexico
City?
Marina Oswald: Yes, he told me that he had visited the two
embassies, that he had received nothing, that the people
who are there are too much—too bureaucratic.
Question: Did you ask him what he did the rest of the time?
Mrs. Oswald: Yes, I think he said that he visited a bull fight,
that he spent most of his time in museums, and that he
did some sightseeing.
Question: Did he tell you about anyone that he met there?
Mrs. Oswald: No. He said that he did not like the Mexican
girls.
Testimony of Marina Oswald
to the President’s Commission,
February 3, 1964
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Contents
Prologue
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1
PART 1
NOVEMBER 22–29, 1963
15
PART 2
THE INVESTIGATION
65
PART 3
THE REPORT
397
PART 4
AFTERMATH
491
Author’s Note
543
Notes
557
Bibliography
593
Acknowledgments
599
Index
605
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Prologue
T
here is no way to know exactly when Charles William Thomas
began to think about suicide. Who could really know such a thing?
Years later, congressional investigators could offer only their strong suspicions about what had finally led Thomas, a former American diplomat
who had spent most of his career in Africa and Latin America, to kill
himself. On Monday, April 12, 1971, at about four p.m., he put a gun to his
head on the second floor of his family’s modest rented house, near the
shores of the Potomac River, in Washington, DC. His wife, downstairs,
thought at first that the boiler had exploded.
Certainly two years earlier, in the summer of 1969, Thomas had reason to be disheartened. He was forty-seven years old, with a wife and two
young daughters to support, and he knew his career at the State Department was over. It was official, even though he still could not fathom why
he was being forced out of a job that he loved and that he thought—that
he knew—he did well. The department long had an “up or out” policy for
members of the diplomatic corps, similar to the military. Either you were
promoted up the ranks or your career was over. And since he had been
denied a promotion to another embassy abroad or to a supervisor’s desk
in Washington, Thomas was “selected out,” to use the department’s
Orwellian terminology for being fired. After eighteen fulfilling, mostly
happy years wandering the globe on behalf of his country, he was told he
had no job.
At first, he thought it must be a mistake, his wife, Cynthia, said. His
personnel records were exemplary, including a recent inspection report
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that described him as “one of the most valuable officers” in the State
Department, whose promotion was “long overdue.” After he was formally
“selected out,” however, there was no easy way to appeal the decision.
And Thomas, a proud, often stoical man, found it demoralizing even to
try. He had already begun boxing up his belongings in his office and
wondering if, at his age, it would be possible to begin a new career.
He did have one piece of unfinished business with the department
before he departed. And on July 25, 1969, he finished typing up a threepage memo, and a one-page cover letter, that he addressed to his ultimate
boss at the department: William P. Rogers, President Nixon’s secretary of
state. Colleagues might have told Thomas it was presumptuous for a midlevel diplomat to write directly to the secretary, but Thomas had reason
to believe that going to Rogers was his only real hope of getting someone’s attention. Thomas was not trying to save his job; it was too late for
that, he told his family. Instead, the memo was a final attempt to resolve
what had been—apart from the puzzle of his dismissal—the biggest, most
confounding mystery of his professional life. Rogers was new to the State
Department, sworn in only six months earlier along with the rest of
Nixon’s cabinet. Thomas hoped Rogers might be willing to second-guess
the career diplomats at the department who—for nearly four years—had
ignored the remarkable story that Thomas kept trying to tell them.
At the top of every page of the memo, Thomas typed—and underlined—
the word “CONFIDENTIAL.”
“Dear Mr. Secretary,” he began. “In winding up my affairs at the
Department of State, there is a pending matter which I believe merits your
attention.”
The memo had a title: “Subject: Investigation of Lee Harvey Oswald
in Mexico.”
His tone was formal and polite, which was certainly in character for
Charles William Thomas, who used his middle name in official correspondence to avoid confusion with another Charles W. Thomas who worked
at the department. He wanted to be remembered as a diplomat—to be
diplomatic—to the end. He knew his memo outlined potentially explosive
national-security information, and he wanted to be careful not to be
perceived as reckless. He had no interest in leaving the State Department
with a reputation of being some sort of crazy conspiracy theorist. At the
end of the 1960s, there were plenty of craven, headline-grabbing “truth-
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seekers” peddling conspiracies about President Kennedy’s assassination.
Thomas did not want to be lumped in with them in the history books—or
in the classified personnel archives of the State Department, for that matter. His memo contained no language suggesting the personal demons
that would lead him to take his life two years later.
Secretary Rogers would have had easy access to the details of Thomas’s career, and they were impressive. Thomas was a self-made man,
orphaned as a boy in Texas and raised in the home of an older sister in
Fort Wayne, Indiana. He served as a navy fighter pilot in World War II,
then enrolled at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where he
earned both a bachelor’s and a law degree. Foreign languages came easily; he was fluent in French and Spanish and, over the years, developed a
working knowledge of German, Italian, Portuguese, and Creole; the last
had been valuable during a diplomatic posting in Haiti. After Northwestern, he studied in Europe and received a doctorate in international
law at the University of Paris. In 1951, he joined the State Department and
served initially in hardship posts in West Africa, where, despite several
severe bouts of malaria, he was remembered for his good humor and
enthusiasm. His friends said he was “the diplomat from central casting”—
six feet tall, blond, preppy handsome, articulate, and charming. Early in
his career, colleagues assumed he was destined to achieve the rank of
ambassador, running his own embassy.
In 1964, Thomas was named a political officer in the United States
embassy in Mexico, where he was posted for nearly three years. Mexico
City was considered an especially important assignment in the 1960s
since the city was a Cold War hot spot—Latin America’s answer to Berlin
or Vienna. There were big Cuban and Soviet embassies, the largest in
Latin America for both Communist governments. And the activities of
Cuban and Soviet diplomats, and the many spies posing as diplomats,
could be closely monitored by the United States with the assistance of
Mexico’s normally cooperative police agencies. The CIA believed that
the Russian embassy in Mexico was the KGB’s base for “wet operations”—
assassinations, in the CIA’s jargon—in the Western Hemisphere. (It would
have been too risky for the KGB to run those operations out of the Russian embassy in Washington.) Mexico City had itself been the scene of
Kremlin-ordered violence in the past. In 1940, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin
dispatched assassins to Mexico City to kill his rival Leon Trotsky, who
was living there in exile.
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Mexico City’s reputation as a center of Cold War intrigue was
cemented by the disclosure that Lee Harvey Oswald had visited the city
only several weeks before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy
in Dallas on Friday, November 22, 1963. Details about Oswald’s Mexico
trip were revealed in news reports published within days of the president’s
murder, giving birth to some of the first serious conspiracy theories about
foreign involvement in the assassination. Everything about Oswald’s stay
in Mexico, which had reportedly lasted six days, was suspicious. A selfproclaimed Marxist, Oswald, who did not hide his Communist leanings
even while serving in the U.S. Marine Corps, visited both the Cuban and
Soviet embassies in Mexico City. It appeared he had gone there to get
visas that would allow him, ultimately, to defect to Cuba. It would be his
second defection attempt. He had tried to renounce his American citizenship when he traveled to the Soviet Union in 1959, only to decide to
return to the United States from Russia three years later, saying that he
had come to disdain Moscow’s brand of Communism, with its petty corruptions and mazelike bureaucracy. He hoped Fidel Castro and his followers in Havana would prove more loyal to the ideals of Marx.
In September 1964, the presidential commission led by Chief Justice
Earl Warren that investigated Kennedy’s assassination, known to the
public from the start as the Warren Commission, identified Oswald as
the assassin and concluded that he had acted alone. In a final report at
the end of a ten-month investigation, the seven-member panel said that
it had uncovered no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic. “The
commission has found no evidence that anyone assisted Oswald in planning or carrying out the assassination,” the report declared. While the
commission could not establish Oswald’s motives for the assassination
with certainty, the report suggested that he was emotionally disturbed and
might have decided to kill the president because of “deep-rooted resentment of all authority” and an “urge to try to find a place in history.”
And in the final days of his employment at the State Department in the
summer of 1969, those were the conclusions that Charles Thomas wanted
someone in the government to revisit. Was it possible that the Warren
Commission had it wrong? Thomas’s memo to Secretary of State Rogers
outlined information about Oswald’s 1963 Mexico visit that “threatened
to reopen the debate about the true nature of the Kennedy assassination and damage the credibility of the Warren Report. . . . Since I was the
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embassy officer who acquired this intelligence information, I feel a responsibility for seeing it through to its final evaluation,” he explained. “Under
the circumstances, it is unlikely that any further investigation of this
matter will ever take place unless it is ordered by a high official in Washington.”
The details of what Thomas had learned were so complex that he felt
the need to number each paragraph in the memo. He enclosed several
other documents that were full of references to accented Spanish-language
names and obscure locations in Mexico City; they offered a complicated
time line of long-ago events. His central message, however, was this: the
Warren Commission had overlooked—or never had a chance to see—
intelligence suggesting that a plot to kill Kennedy might have been hatched,
or at least encouraged, by Cuban diplomats and spies stationed in the
Mexican capital, and that Oswald was introduced to this nest of spies in
September 1963 by a vivacious young Mexican woman who was a fellow
champion of Castro’s revolution.
The woman, Thomas was told, had briefly been Oswald’s mistress in
Mexico City.
As he wrote the memo, Thomas must have realized again how
improbable—even absurd—this might all sound to his soon-to-be former
colleagues at the State Department. If any of his information was right,
how could the Warren Commission have missed it?
In the body of the memo, he identified, by name, the principal source
of his information: Elena Garro de Paz, a popular and critically acclaimed
Mexican novelist of the 1960s. Her fame was enhanced by her marriage
to one of Mexico’s most celebrated writers and poets, Octavio Paz, who
later won the Nobel Prize in Literature. A sharp-witted, mercurial woman,
Garro, who was in her midforties when she met Thomas, spoke several
languages and had lived in Europe for years before returning to Mexico
in 1963. She had done graduate work at both the University of California
at Berkeley and, like Thomas, the University of Paris.
The two had become friends on Mexico City’s lively social circuit and,
in December 1965, she offered the American diplomat a tantalizing story.
She revealed—reluctantly, Thomas said—that she had encountered Oswald
at a party of Castro sympathizers during his visit in the fall of 1963.
It had been a “twist party”—Chubby Checker’s hit song was wildly
popular in Mexico, too—and Oswald was not the only American there,
Garro said. He had been in the company of two young “beatnik” American
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men. “The three were evidently friends, because she saw them by chance
the next day walking down the street together,” Thomas wrote. At the
party, Oswald wore a black sweater and “tended to be silent and stared a
lot at the floor,” Garro recalled. She did not talk to any of the Americans
or learn their names. She said she learned Oswald’s name only after seeing his photograph in Mexican newspapers and on television after the
assassination.
A senior Cuban diplomat was also at the party, she said. Eusebio
Azque, who held the title of consul, ran the embassy’s visa office. (In the
memo, Thomas said that Azque’s other duties included espionage; the
U.S. embassy believed he was a high-ranking officer in Castro’s spy service, the Dirección General de Inteligencia, or DGI.) It was Azque’s consular office in Mexico City that Oswald had visited in hopes of obtaining
a Cuban visa.
Garro, a fierce anti-Communist, loathed the Cuban diplomat. Before
Kennedy’s assassination, she said, she had heard Azque speak openly of
his hope that someone would kill the American president, given the threat
that Kennedy posed to the survival of the Castro government. The October
1962 Cuban missile crisis, and the bungled CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs
invasion a year before that, would have been fresh in Azque’s memory.
Garro recalled a party at which she and other guests overheard a “heated
discussion” in which Azque supported the view that “the only solution
was to kill him”—President Kennedy.
Also at the party, Garro said, was a notably pretty twenty-five-year-old
Mexican woman who worked for Azque at the consulate: Silvia Tirado de
Duran, who was related to Garro by marriage. Duran was an outspoken
Socialist and a supporter of Castro, which helped explain how she had
gotten a job working for the Cubans. Thomas found a copy of the Warren
Commission report in the embassy’s library and could see that Duran’s
name appeared dozens of times in its pages; the commission determined
it was Duran who had dealt with Oswald during his visits to the Cuban
mission in Mexico. She had helped him fill out his visa application, and it
appeared that she had gone out of her way to assist him. Duran’s name
and phone number were found in a notebook seized among Oswald’s
belongings.
Garro told Thomas that she never liked Duran, both because of Duran’s
left-wing politics and because of what Garro described as the younger
woman’s scandalous personal life. Duran was married to Garro’s cousin,
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but it was widely rumored in Mexico City that she had had a torrid affair
three years earlier with Cuba’s ambassador to Mexico, who was also
married; the ambassador had offered to leave his wife to be with Duran.
“Garro has never had anything to do with Silvia, whom she detests and
considers a whore,” Thomas wrote. (It would later be determined that the
CIA had both Duran and the ambassador under surveillance in Mexico;
the agency would claim it could document the affair.)
It was only after the Kennedy assassination, Garro said, that she learned
that Duran had briefly taken Oswald as a lover. Garro told Thomas that
Duran had not only bedded Oswald, she had introduced him around
town to Castro’s supporters, Cubans and Mexicans alike. It was Duran
who had arranged Oswald’s invitation to the dance party. “She was his
mistress,” Garro insisted. She told Thomas that “it was common knowledge that Silvia Duran was the mistress of Oswald.”
Thomas asked Garro if she had told this story to anyone else. She
explained that, for nearly a year after the assassination, she had kept quiet,
fearing her information might somehow endanger her safety, as well as
the safety of her twenty-six-year-old daughter, who also remembered
seeing Oswald at the party. In the fall of 1964, however, just after the
Warren Commission had ended its investigation, she found the nerve to
meet with American embassy officials in Mexico City and tell them what
she knew. To her surprise, she said, she heard nothing from the embassy
after that.
In his memo to the secretary of state, Thomas was careful to acknowledge this might all be fiction, offered up to him by an exceptionally talented writer of fiction. Garro, he admitted, had a reputation for a vivid
imagination, and her politics might color her perceptions; it was possible
that she had simply mistaken another young man at the party for Oswald.
“I knew Garro to be something of a professional anti-Communist who
tended to see a Communist plot behind any untoward political event,”
Thomas wrote. “A careful investigation of these allegations could perhaps explain them away.” Still, there was a need for another review of
her story, he said. “It would be easy and convenient to sweep this matter
under the rug by claiming that Miss Garro is an unreliable informant
since she is emotional, opinioned and artistic,” he wrote. “But on the basis
of the facts that I have presented, I believe that, on balance, the matter
warrants further investigation.”
According to his memo, Thomas’s senior colleagues in the embassy
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8 | philip shenon
knew all about Garro’s claims because he had told them. He wrote them
long reports after each of his conversations with her in 1965. He set aside
part of Christmas Day that year to write a memo—it was dated December
25—recounting what he had heard that morning from her at a holiday
party. He made sure his memos went straight to Winston “Win” Scott,
the CIA’s station chief in Mexico. The courtly, Alabama-born Scott, then
fi ft y-six years old, had sources at the highest levels of the Mexican
government, including a series of Mexican presidents who sought his
protection and whose top aides became some of the CIA’s best-paid
informants in the country. Many Mexican officials saw Scott, who took
up his post in 1956, as far more powerful than any of the American
ambassadors he had worked with. His deputies knew he also wielded
extraordinary influence back at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia,
in part because of his decades-long friendship with James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s counterintelligence director—the agency’s chief “mole
hunter.” Both men had been with the CIA since its founding in 1947.
In his memo to Rogers, Thomas said that Scott and others in the
embassy did not pursue the information tying Oswald to the Cubans.
After initial expressions of interest, Scott essentially ignored what Thomas
had learned, even when Thomas tried to raise the questions again in 1967,
as he prepared to leave Mexico for a new posting in Washington.
Thomas acknowledged that “even if all the allegations in the attached
memo were true, they would not, in themselves, prove that there was a
conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy.” But he concluded his letter
to Rogers by warning of the danger to the government if Garro’s allegations, unproven but uninvestigated, became known outside the State
Department and the CIA. “If they were ever made public, those who have
tried to discredit the Warren Report could have a field day in speculating
about their implications,” Thomas wrote. “The credibility of the Warren
Report would be damaged all the more if it were learned that these allegations were known and never adequately investigated.”
Thomas’s last day of employment at the State Department was July 31, 1969,
only six days after the date on his memo to Secretary Rogers. It is not
clear from the department’s records if Thomas was immediately informed
about what happened next with his memo, but the department did pass
on his information—to the CIA. On August 29, in a letter stamped confidential, the State Department’s Division of Protective Security wrote
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to the CIA and asked for an appraisal of Thomas’s material. It provided
the agency with Thomas’s memo, along with several supporting documents.
A little less than three weeks later, the CIA sent back its curt reply. It
read, in full: “Subject: Charles William Thomas. Reference is made to
your memorandum of 28 August 1969. We have examined the attachments, and see no need for further action. A copy of this reply has been
sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the United States Secret
Ser vice.” The memo was signed by Angleton, the CIA counterintelligence
chief, and one of his deputies, Raymond Rocca. Thomas was notified of
the CIA’s rebuff and, as far as he knew, that was where the paper trail
stopped; apparently, nothing more was to be done.
After his suicide two years later, the Washington Post published a 186word obituary that made only a passing reference to how Thomas had
died: “Police said the cause of death was gunshot wounds.” (Actually, his
death certificate identified only one gunshot wound—to his right temple.) After pleas from his family, congressional investigators reviewed his
personnel files and determined that Thomas had been “selected out” from
the State Department in error. A clerical mistake had cost him his career,
or so it appeared; an important job performance report endorsing his
promotion had been left out of his personnel files for reasons that were
never fully explained.
Congressional investigators later suspected that there had been other
factors in the decision to force Thomas out, including his persistent,
unwelcome effort to get someone to follow up on Garro’s allegations. “I
always thought it was linked, somehow, to his questions about Oswald,”
said a former investigator for the House of Representatives. “It was impossible to prove, though. If he was forced out because of Mexico City, it was
all done with a wink and a nod.” There were rumors in Mexico that one
of Win Scott’s deputies at the embassy there had mounted a whispering
campaign intended to damage Thomas’s reputation—for reasons that
Thomas’s many Mexican friends could never fathom.
Former senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, chairman of the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence from 1979 to 1981, helped Thomas’s family
obtain some of the pension benefits they were initially denied after his
suicide. Bayh said he intervened, at first, because Thomas had such strong
family roots in Indiana. In a 2013 interview, he said he remained perplexed
by Thomas’s dismissal. “It never made sense,” said Bayh, who insisted that
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he was never informed of any link between Thomas and the investigation
of the Kennedy assassination. The former senator said that he could not
necessarily draw a connection between Thomas’s ouster from the department and what he had learned—and tried to expose—in Mexico City. “But
something happened to Charles Thomas,” Bayh said. “He was harassed
to death by his government.”
Late one afternoon in the spring of 2008, the phone rang at my desk in
the Washington bureau of the New York Times. The caller was someone I
had never met—a prominent American lawyer who had begun his career
almost half a century earlier as a young staff investigator on the Warren
Commission. “You ought to tell our story,” he said. “We’re not young, but
a lot of us from the commission are still around, and this may be our last
chance to explain what really happened.” His call was prompted, he said,
by the generous reviews I had received that year after the publication of
my first book—a history of the government commission that investigated
the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. My caller offered to do all he
could to help me with a similar history of the Warren Commission, so
long as I did not identify him to his former colleagues as the man who
had suggested the idea. “I don’t want to take the blame for this when you
find out the unflattering stuff,” he said, adding that the backstory of the
commission was “the best detective story you’ve never heard.”
And so began a five-year reporting project to piece together the inside
story of the most important, and most misunderstood, homicide investigation of the twentieth century—the Warren Commission’s investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy. Chief Justice Warren and
the other six members of the commission died long before I began work
on this book—the last surviving member, former president Gerald Ford,
died in 2006—but my caller was right that most of the then young lawyers who did the actual detective work in 1964 were still alive. And I’m
grateful that almost all of them have been willing to speak with me.
Sadly, time has begun to catch up with my sources, too. Some of the
commission investigators and other key figures who granted me interviews for the book have died, most notably former senator Arlen Specter
of Pennsylvania, who had been a junior staff lawyer on the commission.
This book is therefore their last testament about the work of the commission and about the Kennedy assassination. I was the last journalist to
interview former FBI special agent James Hosty, a central witness before
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the Warren Commission because he had Lee Harvey Oswald under surveillance in Dallas for months before the assassination. Hosty faced
obvious questions about why he and his colleagues at the FBI had not
been able to stop Oswald. In interviews shortly before his death in June
2011, Hosty insisted that he became the scapegoat—both within the FBI
and for the Warren Commission—for the incompetence and duplicity of
others in the government.
The title of this book is drawn from the first line of the introduction
to the commission’s final report: “The assassination of John Fitzgerald
Kennedy on November 22, 1963, was a cruel and shocking act of violence
directed against a man, a family, a nation, and against all mankind.” But
while A Cruel and Shocking Act began as an attempt to write the first
comprehensive inside history of the Warren Commission, it has become
something much larger and, I believe, more important. In many ways,
this book is an account of my discovery of how much of the truth about
the Kennedy assassination has still not been told, and how much of the
evidence about the president’s murder was covered up or destroyed—
shredded, incinerated, or erased—before it could reach the commission.
Senior officials at both the CIA and the FBI hid information from the
panel, apparently in hopes of concealing just how much they had known
about Lee Harvey Oswald and the threat that he posed. As this book will
reveal for the first time, important witnesses to events surrounding the
assassination were ignored or were threatened into silence. The reporting
for this book has taken me to places and introduced me to people I would
never have imagined would be so important to understanding President
Kennedy’s death.
I became a victim of the dual curse faced by anyone who tries to get
closer to the truth about the assassination—of too little information and
too much. I made the astonishing, nearly simultaneous discovery of how
much vital evidence about President Kennedy’s murder has disappeared
and also of how much has been preserved. There is now so much material in the public record about the assassination, including literally millions of pages of once-secret government files, that no reporter or scholar
can claim to have seen it all. Whole collections of evidence have still not
been adequately reviewed by researchers, almost exactly fift y years after
the events they describe. I was the first researcher, for example, to be
given full access to the papers of Charles Thomas, including the record of
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12 | philip shenon
his struggle to get colleagues to pay attention to the astonishing story of
Oswald and the “twist party” in Mexico City, and I did not see the material until 2013.
The records of the Warren Commission—its formal name was the
President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy—fill
up 363 cubic feet of shelf space in well-guarded, climate-controlled storage rooms at a National Archives facility in College Park, Maryland, just
outside Washington, DC. Thousands of the commission’s physical exhibits are there, including Oswald’s 6.5-millimeter Italian-made MannlicherCarcano rifle, the murder weapon found on the sixth floor of the Texas
School Book Depository, as well as the nearly intact three-centimeter
copper-jacketed, lead-core bullet that was discovered near a stretcher at
Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas on the afternoon of the assassination. The commission’s staff—although significantly, not the commission itself—concluded that the bullet, fired from Oswald’s $21 mail-order
rifle, passed through the bodies of both President Kennedy and Texas
governor John Connally in a scenario that became known as “the singlebullet theory.”
The rose-pink suit worn by Jacqueline Kennedy in the motorcade is
also stored in the modern, fortresslike complex in suburban Maryland.
The suit, an American-made Chanel knockoff that was a favorite of the
president’s (Mrs. Kennedy “looks ravishing in it,” he told a friend) is preserved in an acid-free container in a windowless vault. The vault is kept
at a temperature of between 65 and 68 degrees Fahrenheit (between 18.3
and 20 degrees Celsius), the humidity set at 40 percent. The filtered air in
the vault is changed at least six times every hour in order to help preserve the delicate wool fabric, which remains stained with the president’s
blood. The whereabouts of Mrs. Kennedy’s iconic pink pillbox hat is a
mystery; it was last known to be in the custody of her former personal
secretary. A separate vault, kept at a constant temperature of 25 degrees
Fahrenheit (−4 degrees Celsius), is used for the storage and preservation
of a small strip of celluloid that is believed, by the National Archives, to be
the most watched piece of film in the history of motion pictures. It was
on those 486 frames of Kodachrome-brand 8mm color film that a Dallas
women’s wear manufacturer, Abraham Zapruder, captured the terrible
images of the assassination on his Bell & Howell home-movie camera.
Much of Warren’s personal paperwork from the commission that bore
his name is stored at the Library of Congress, just a few minutes’ walk
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a cruel and shocking act | 13
down First Street from his former chambers at the Supreme Court. Warren, who died in 1974, might be startled to know that millions of Americans know of him principally because of the commission, not because
of his history-making sixteen-year tenure as chief justice.
The decision to preserve the vast library of investigative reports and
physical evidence gathered by the Warren Commission, and now retained
at the National Archives and the Library of Congress, was meant to be
reassuring to the public—proof of the commission’s transparency and of
its diligence. At the National Archives alone, there are more than five
million pages of documents related to the assassination. But the truth
about the Warren Commission, as most serious historians and other scholars will acknowledge, even those who fully support its findings, is that its
investigation was flawed from the start. The commission made grievous errors. It failed to pursue important evidence and witnesses because
of limitations imposed on the investigation by the man who ran it, Chief
Justice Warren. Often, Warren seemed more interested in protecting the
legacy of his beloved friend President Kennedy, and of the Kennedy
family, than in getting to the full facts about the president’s murder.
On the subject of the assassination, history will be far kinder to the
commission’s surviving staff lawyers, as well as its former in-house historian, who reveal in this book what really happened inside the Warren
Commission. Much of this book is their story, told through their eyes.
The lawyers, mostly in their twenties and thirties at the time of the investigation, were recruited from prestigious law firms, law schools, and
prosecutors’ offices around the country. Most are now at the end of long
careers in law or public ser vice. For several, being interviewed for this
book was the first time they have talked in this much detail, certainly to
any journalist, about the commission’s work. Many have kept their silence
for decades, fearful of being dragged into ugly, and often unwinnable,
public debates with the armies of conspiracy theorists. Without exception, all of these men—the one woman among the lawyers, Alfredda
Scobey, died in 2001—retained pride in their individual work on the commission. Many, however, were outraged to discover how much evidence
they were never permitted to see. It is evidence, they know, that is still
rewriting the history of the Kennedy assassination.
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